Why is America always assumed to be the centre of the wrestling universe?

[David Mantell]

4 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

The fact that the NWA champion rarely toured Europe brings into question the prestige of European wrestling at the time. 

I don't really see how anyone from Europe can be considered a bigger star than the NWA champions of the 70s, Bruno, Baba & Inoki, Dusty Rhodes, Andre the Giant, etc. Many of those stars were wrestling dates all over the world. 

I think perhaps you're overestimating the global importance of the NWA World title.  I didn't know of its existence until 1988 - we had our own World Heavyweight title which Quinn and Wayne Bridges fought for on FA Cup Final day 1980, Bridges won over Jim Harris in the second highest bout on the bill after Daddy vs sTax at Wembley '81 and Kendo had won from Bridges in late '87.
Andre, apart from his time challenging Wanz in '87 had already been a big name back home in France and had been on World Of Sport in spring '69.  Bruno and Dusty I'm sceptical about how big they were globally beyond North America and Japan.

[PeteF3]

He was in Memphis full-time in 1980, filling a void left by Jerry Lawler who missed essentially the entire year with a broken leg. He also had a full-time run in Tri-State in the late '70s, which was an even sleepier territory with brutal road trips to boot (and which would not explode as a big-money promotion until Watts split off and hit it big with the JYD-Michael Hayes feud).

Robinson's one-off UK return against Lee Bronson and Pat Roach in 1976 can almost assuredly be chalked up to being a tax write-off--work a match or two and that trip home to visit family or renew a visa or whatever he was doing is suddenly a business expense.

[David Mantell]

2 hours ago, Shrike02 said:

I'd suggest your proposition needs some evidence adduced in order for anyone to judge the merit of these two claims. Especially as you have to establish some sort of nexus of causation for NWE wrestling of 60-70s-> NA wrestling popularity of 80s onward. Received wisdom is the death of the territories paved the way for WWE's explosive growth in the mid 80s.

I'd say that the territory era, or at least the 30 year gap between the end of the 40s/50s American TV wrestling boom and Vince getting the WWF onto MTV and NBC represented an extended dip period for wrestling's public profile in Amerca at a time when it was certainly much higher in Britain and for a fair while in France also. 

Consider how the ITV Golden Age and the NWA territories era were actually concurrent!

[David Mantell]

11 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

I think perhaps you're overestimating the global importance of the NWA World title.

Having said that, I think Billy Robinson's initial motive for going to North America was a naive and youthful desire to use his vast shoot skills to double cross his way to a major American version of a world title - consider how the first thing he did in Stampede pretty much was to double cross Archie Gouldie in an eliminator match for a shot at Dory Funk Jr - and thanks to having a sympathetic Stu Hart as the promoter he got away with it.

[PeteF3]

18 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

I think perhaps you're overestimating the global importance of the NWA World title. 

The Wrestler magazine in the '60s certainly gave it coverage and held Dory Funk, Jr. in plenty of regard. It wasn't a breathless recap of every last title defense but readers of the magazine certainly would have known who he was and of his status as "World" Champion and somebody that multiple Britain-based wrestlers named as a dream opponent. And Wayne Bridges' son Dean Brisco may or may not have taken his ring name from Jack.

[PeteF3]

All accounts are that the Robinson-Gouldie match was supposed to be a disputed decision with each person getting a shot at Funk as a result. The dispute seemed to be over Gouldie getting the bigger-money spot against Funk during Stampede Week. Robinson was motivated by money, not being a belt mark. As he replied at a wrestling convention in the mid-'00s to someone who asked why he never held the AWA Title, "I got paid enough without being the champion."

[David Mantell]

10 minutes ago, PeteF3 said:

Robinson was motivated by money, not being a belt mark.

I think he was a reputation mark rather than a belt mark.  He knew about Lou Thesz obviously from Thesz's visit in the late '50s- and Assirati's (unapproved by promoters) grandstanding challenge to Thesz at the Royal Albert Hall and fancied his chances against Thesz in a "smoker" public shoot match, a win in which would establish Robinson as top shooter on the planet. 

He was certainly enough of a belt mark to want to get Billy Joyce to job the British and European Heavyweight titles to him - which Joyce reportedly only agreed to do once Robinson could beat him on the mat in Riley's Gym.

[PeteF3]

Belts were and are a means to an end--the end being getting paid. Robinson had about 753 shots at Verne Gagne and Nick Bockwinkel and Dory Funk among other champions of varying prestige and aside from maybe a little subterfuge with Inoki, played ball for all of them.

And when Inoki stiffed him (at least in Billy's mind) on pay after that match, he jumped to All-Japan and promptly did a clean-as-a-sheet job to Giant Baba just to stick it to him. So, yeah, he definitely had a spiteful streak in him. 

[Embrodak]

You’re way underestimating wrestling’s popularity in America prior to the WWF’s national expansion. This is an area where Corny’s cantankerous ass and copious quantity of preserved notes, financial statements, and other administrative ephemera is actually useful. Without a large and voracious audience, you simply do not have multiple territories sustaining independent, multi-decade, low- to no-merch operations over decently large geographic areas that required guys to drive many hours in their cars between gigs with no guaranteed money. The idea that it was some scummy thing with no profile is the self-promoting propaganda of Vince McMahon, not reality. The reason it has minimal mainstream media presence is it tended to be covered more in local news outlets than in national ones. If anything, it’s arguable that the WWF’s national expansion either caused or was emblematic of a decline in wrestling’s total popularity in America, though this is harder to assess given the territory promoters had zero reason to accurately track such things as long as it was overall profitable, lest the tax man discover how much they weren’t reporting.

[ohtani's jacket]

1 hour ago, David Mantell said:

I think perhaps you're overestimating the global importance of the NWA World title.  I didn't know of its existence until 1988 - we had our own World Heavyweight title which Quinn and Wayne Bridges fought for on FA Cup Final day 1980, Bridges won over Jim Harris in the second highest bout on the bill after Daddy vs sTax at Wembley '81 and Kendo had won from Bridges in late '87.
Andre, apart from his time challenging Wanz in '87 had already been a big name back home in France and had been on World Of Sport in spring '69.  Bruno and Dusty I'm sceptical about how big they were globally beyond North America and Japan.

I'm fairly confident that a world title that was defended in territories throughout the world was more important than the British, European or World Heavyweight championships. Folks in the UK may have been unaware of what was happening overseas, but the countries overseas were equally unaware of what was happening in the UK. Bruno drew bigger crowds in the North-East than anyone was capable of drawing in Europe, but may not have had the global impact that others did. Dusty travelled to overseas territories. My parents used to watch him live when he toured New Zealand and were big fans. 

[Dav'oh]

2 hours ago, David Mantell said:

True they were quicker off the mark on the internet

This ignores a lot of curation, official and unofficial (I place the bevy of wrestling mags in the latter).

I also feel you ignored/overlooked Australia as the world's hottest territory at one, prolonged, point. Apparently they were very well paid, too, to continue a different observation. You even mentioned Spiros Arion, but in a European context.

[David Mantell]

4 hours ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Bruno drew bigger crowds in the North-East than anyone was capable of drawing in Europe

The business model in the UK and I believe France also was based on intensity of touring, not single big dates. 6000 shows per year, weekly residencies in over 30 cities.

[David Mantell]

4 hours ago, Dav'oh said:

I also feel you ignored/overlooked Australia as the world's hottest territory at one, prolonged, point. Apparently they were very well paid, too, to continue a different observation. You even mentioned Spiros Arion, but in a European context.

I take it we're talking about Jim Barnett's Australian WCW of 1964-1978 (which he folded to spend more time and effort on Georgia) rather than 1920s-1950s when Australia had its OWN wrestling - George Penchef, Alan Pinfold etc

[Dav'oh]

18 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

I take it we're talking about Jim Barnett's Australian WCW of 1964-1978

That falls within your parameters, so yes ("I would put it to you all that in the 60s, 70s and even into the early 80s, the centre of the wrestling universe was Northwest Europe"). To deny us patronage of our own wrestling scene and attempting to invalidate it due to the ethnicity of the promoter, is quite something. The crowds were Australian, the arenas were Australian, the moolah was Australian.

Doyle (Barnett's partner) sold his share in 1968; Barnett left in 1973. He did not "fold it to spend more time and effort on Georgia".

"The tax code changed, making it more expensive for Barnett to run WCW; and the new government required that all Australian companies be composed of at least 51% Australians. On top of that, Channel 9, on which WCW had been airing for years, decided that the current product was much too violent, and decided to no longer broadcast the shows live, so that they could edit the footage if need be. Barnett hated this. So Barnett began looking to sell off WCW, and to buy back in to the American circuit. Furthermore, by the end of 1972, business had begun to taper. However, in 1973, while he started looking to get out of Australia, Barnett began blowing off of his big storylines, presumably to ensure that was around when his share of the percentage came in for those shows. Additionally, he concocted the most famous angle in WCW’s history: The War. Beginning in April and lasting until the fall, The War saw groups form around Mark Lewin, the babyface leader, and Big Bad Jon, the heel leader. The feud was marked by its violence, blood, and brawling, highlighted by either 6-man or 8-man cage matches. While the rosters of the respective teams changed, the main babyfaces, known as the People’s Army, in addition to Lewin were Spiros Arion, Sheik Ayoub, King Curtis, Mario Milano, and Karl Kox, while the heels were Waldo Von Erick, Bulldog Brower, Hiro and Hito, Abdullah the Butcher, Tyler Singh, Blackjack Slade, and others. The angle was a financial success, although business dipped towards the end because of how long and intense it was. Also during the year, the NWA World’s Champion Jack Briscoe had four different titles defenses during his visit. Barnett had used up every major angle in the territory, and squeezed as much out of this year as he could. All in all, Barnett had booked 1973 as the most fiscally successful year in the history of WCW. And then he sold his shares in December, and was gone by the new year. Thus was the beginning of the end for World Championship Wrestling." (credit: Lance Larson).

I am not for one second asking why Australia isn't considered the "centre of the wrestling niverse" in those years. I have no horse in this race.

[David Mantell]

Anyway, to summarise, Northwest Europe in the 1960/1970s/early 1980s had:

• higher profile TV (and other media eg TVTimes) windows for wrestling
• greater public respectability for wrestling (esp Britain)
• in the case of Germany, more heavily interwoven into the fabric of traditional culture.

than North America during the same period and this has lead to:

• the survival in 2023 of more traditional old school wrestling cultures (3 versus 1  -  2 if you count Puerto Rico)

[David Mantell]

The problem with WCW Australia in this debate was that Barnett treated it as an adjunct of American wrestling.  It would be like me trying to make the argument for Britain based chiefly on SummerSlam '92.

[Dav'oh]

One night compared, equally, to over a decade? One stadium show compared to the infrastructure of a nationally touring company? You're better than that. Plus, 1992 isn't in your time-line.

Adjunct schmadjunct. It's still the Australian "scene".

[ohtani's jacket]

50 minutes ago, David Mantell said:

The business model in the UK and I believe France also was based on intensity of touring, not single big dates. 6000 shows per year, weekly residencies in over 30 cities.

And it was a fine business model. It just wasn't the center of the wrestling universe. Even if you bundle all of Europe together -- the UK, France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Spain, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and anywhere else I'm forgetting that had wrestling, I'm not convinced it was more important than the US and Japan. You could argue the wrestling was better, and you might be able to convince me that London and Paris were hotbeds of wrestling with more shows per week than Tokyo or any of the major cities in the US, but ultimately it comes down to money. The talent went where the money was. 

[ohtani's jacket]

Also, I can't believe those god damn awful German handhelds are being held up as a positive. 

[David Mantell]

1 hour ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Also, I can't believe those god damn awful German handhelds are being held up as a positive. 

No, I was thinking of the more professionally shot German stuff with multicams and a hardcam which started at an incredibly early stage given the wider evolution of the home video industry.

(That's 12 July not 7th Dec btw - sergje1 uses British-style dates on his channel)

 

[Robert S]

I don't really want to get into this discussion (the amount of posts happening seems to make it very time consuming), but there are a lot of apples vs. oranges comparisons and half-truths happening here. Just some points that come quickly into my mind, mostly concentrating on Austria & Germany:

• US had wrestling on local TV, Germany & Austria had wrestling at best as clips in potpourri segments (until the late 80ies when the WWF got its first slot). But I would also not draw a comparison here as there were no private TV stations in either country at that time. In Germany you usually had three public (two national and one local) station until 1985 (and the first couple of private stations had marginal numbers for the first years), in Austria, the first national private TV station launched in 2000 (though obviously we got German private TV station), before there were only two public stations.
• From my understanding, German & Austrian wrestling was (at least in the 70ies and 80ies) less built on bigger and smaller events but more on constant drawing, i.e. more like a circus or a broadway show. So it made less sense to fly in e.g. an NWA champion.
• CWA was not a touring company compared to traditional US territories, there were a small amount of cities they ran longer "tournaments" at (again, like a circus). Most cities or regions of those countries never got wrestling (for example, I would be shocked if there was ever a wrestling event in the state I live in). CWA concentrated their operations to northern Germany (Hannover, Bremen) and eastern Austria (Vienna, Graz). There were smaller tournaments outside of this cities (e.g. cagematch - obviously anything but a complete archive - lists three shows in Saalfelden of all places, this had to be sold shows). Before CWA, who knows - definitely not me. The little I have heard, read or seen from the time before 1970 was all from Vienna, but that's where the media center of Austria is, so that does not had to mean anything. Though considering that my father - who had no interest in wrestling at all - could name a couple of Austrian wrestlers from the pre-Wanz era, I have to assume that it was present in national media before that as well.
• Otto Wanz being a household name is both true and misleading. Wanz was a great self-promoter and knew what to do to get himself known. I think most name recognition in the public stems from his appearence on "Wetten, dass...?", a German Saturday night entertainment show that drew HUGE TV numbers in the 80ies and 90ies (I thinkt he record rating was something like 40% (of all Germans alive!) in 1985). I know I knew his name from there but had no real understanding what pro wrestling was until many years later. Of course Wanz did his phone book act there. Probably for eastern Austria there was more association between the name Wanz and Catchen than in Germany, but still.

[David Mantell]

About the best US TV wrestling in the years between DuMont and SNME was about the level of Reslo or the 1990/1993 Relwyskow tapings for Grampian/STV. 

The ITV and (O)RTF/Antenne 2 deals were light years ahead of anything any one American promoter had during that time and they had vast reach even to other continents with sale of kinescope prints of matches to dozens of third world countries.

I've read a history of pre-CWA GFR/Austria a few months back - the VDB was about the biggest of the bunch but it was a tangled web.

[PeteF3]

I question how many American stations were actually low-power, low-level stations airing territorial wrestling. WMC in Memphis was/is an NBC affiliate (and co-hosted by one of the most popular news personalities in the city in Dave Brown). WRAL in Raleigh was with ABC at the time. As was KTBS-Shreveport. WWOR was an independent "superstation" a la WTBS back when independent local TV stations had way more prominence than they did with the rise of cable and FCC deregulation. KTVT-Ft. Worth and KXTX-Dallas were lower-level independent stations in the Metroplex, but I'm not seeing a great pattern at first glance.

(Full disclosure and sorry if I'm overexplaining: for the territorial era there were three major national over-the-air networks--ABC, NBC, and CBS. Plus most markets had at least one if not more independent stations that aired local programming, syndicated programs both first-run and reruns, local sports, etc. FOX launched as a fourth network in 1986 but was a distant, less-respected fourth place with a few buzzworthy shows, namely The Simpsons, In Living Color, and Married with Children, until ol' Rupert landed rights to the NFL in 1994, which changed a lot of things. Cable channels as we think of them now started launching in limited markets in the early-to-mid '70s and expanded throughout the '80s and '90s, I would assume at a greater clip than almost any other country except maybe Canada. Even in tech-advanced places like Japan, cable never really took off at all even by the 2000s. FCC de-regulation in the early '80s led to among other things the demise of the rule limiting advertising on networks to 10 minutes per hour--this led to the rise of the infomercial and combined with cable led to the demise of a lot of non-news local programming, including wrestling since networks could make more selling entire blocks of TV time instead of commercial breaks during a show.)

[David Mantell]

3 hours ago, PeteF3 said:

WMC in Memphis was/is an NBC affiliate (and co-hosted by one of the most popular news personalities in the city in Dave Brown).

British equivalent would be a show in a single non-syndicated ITV regional franchise with the bloke who did the local news bulletin after ITN's News At Ten hosting it. Non wrestling examples would be Today on Thames TV infamous for the 1976 incident with Bill Grundy and the Sex Pistols or Granada TV's So It Goes music show hosted by future Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, a man now considered a second John Peel but at the time such a second division media shill they got Steve Coogan to play him in the movie. The first couple of years of Tiswas when it was only on in ATV Midlands would be another good non Wrestling example.

In other words like I said about the same level as the 1991 Relwskow taping on Grampian/STV or Reslo on S4C which officially covered the same area - Wales- as HTV and BBC (1) Wales, (I say officially because a lot of the south and east of the republic of Ireland could get the signal and Orig Williams was able to take a boatload of wrestlers on tours of small town southern Ireland from the mid 80s to the early 00s doing deal to get halls from the local priests.). I guess the French equivalent would have been a non syndicated broadcast on a single region of FR3 (home of Le Catch from Aug 85 to circa Nov 87.)

To be fair to Memphis TV, the interview set on the wrestling show looked passably like the set on Countdown with Richard Whitely on Channel 4 although studio wrestling in front of two rows of fans always made an Outside Broadcast of a house show in a town hall, leisure centre or civic theatre look slick and polished by comparison. Consider how even the WWF was prepared to stoop to using that ITV kind of venue - a theatre with some seat removed to make room for the ring and placed on the stage (now banned in the UK for health/safety reasons) and other seats turned to face the ring- for the very first RAW in 1993.

In Britain, cable TV was a way of having Sky TV on the quiet so you could watch WWF - or New Catch on Eurosport - without having a ruddy great vulgar Astra satellite dish on your front wall for the neighbours to mutter about.Until the early 2010s analogue switch off, anything less than the by then 5 free to air analogue terrestrial TV stations just wasn't proper national TV.

[PeteF3]

1 hour ago, David Mantell said:

British equivalent would be a show in a single non-syndicated ITV regional franchise with the bloke who did the local news bulletin after ITN's News At Ten hosting it.

The English equivalent is also about the size of just the state of Alabama. Or about the size of Jarrett's territory. You are aware that there are gigantic geographical and population differences between 1 country in Europe and 1 country that's about the size of the whole continent, right?

This is like arguing with people (mostly Americans) who wonder why our sports leagues can't have promotion and relegation like the cool, exotic foreign leagues do. Because London and Greater Manchester have like 6 teams apiece in the Premiere League and things aren't going to be thrown into upheaval on multiple levels if one of them gets relegated the way it would if a New York team got relegated and replaced by one from Tucson.